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Comment by jtr1 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I've come across similar stories and sentiments among scientist and engineer friends. A frustrating experience to be sure, but it strikes me that these are people whose jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary. What surprises me most is to hear a person whose identity is grounded in curiosity and exploration write off that experience as horse shit, without questioning first whether they lacked the tools to understand it.

Perhaps you just had a bad teacher?

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I think that many, many scientists and engineers are not really interested in curiosity and exploration at all -- they are interested in solving well-specified problems using previously trained and learned techniques. They are interested in final answers and the satisfaction of completing a task successfully.

I suspect people who whine about "what the author intended" or that "you can make it up as you go along" really lack the mental/creative flexibility to wrestle and dance with art and miss the point that the act of interpretation is a purpose in and of itself: you express art/ideas by interpreting another's work; your interpretation is art itself since art is a conversation. It's the job of artists to create a work that's deep and flexible and inspiring enough to generate many possible interpretations.

Not everybody has to like it but don't just dismiss it out of hand, recognize that brilliant creative people find value in it and the value is there, it just takes work to get at it just like it takes work to find beauty in well-written code or a system of complex equations, and it's a wholly different kind of satisfaction and beauty you find in the humanities; if you took the time and effort to honestly try it you might like it and like it or not that kind of expansion of the mind is something everyone could use a little more of.

I've sat many a days and pondered over much of modern art. I can think of nothing but "its shit" when I see a carefully placed piece of dog shit on a plate being passed as art. So I asked a more artistic person than myself.

They responded: Of course, this piece of shit on the plate symbolizes what people are fed throughout their lives - either literally eating unhealthy foods (shit) or more theoretically through the bullshit they encounter throughout their lives. The artist was trying to convey a message about life: everything can be, or is, shit being fed to you on a platter.

Disclaimer: I made all of this up on the spot, but I have seen shit on a plate being passed as art before. So it was partially inspired, which I guess makes the dog shit on a plate art. By some standards.

Or maybe they're different from you, and writing off their perspective as "narrow and inflexible" is, itself, narrow and inflexible.

Everyone has a perspective, and all perspectives are fundamentally interesting in their own right. Is that not the humanist idea? Is that not what a liberal education is supposed to teach?

A liberal education doesn't require that we tolerate intolerence; it doesn't require that when someone expresses disgust and acts above something they don't understand that we just throw our hands up and say "well all opinions are equally valid". Postmodernism doesn't require that we consider all interpretations and opinions equally valid, just that we realize the value is in the interpretation itself.

You're correct I come off as a little defensive, but this thread is full of obnoxious condescending engineers who think since they know some math and science they are better than everyone at everything, and that everything they don't understand is because it's not worth understanding. It is full of people attacking art because "it's useless, I didn't get it so it's trash and anyone who pretends to is a liar and I'll have fries with that English major scum LOL" And I'll attack that attitude with the ferocity it deserves; it's disgusting and a disservice to all of us.

I'm a scientist as well so I'm of course sympathetic to those who aren't particularly interested in the humanities and I think that's just fine but in a toxic environment like this I'll go out of my way to defend them aggressively since far too often I see people just roll over.

> A liberal education doesn't require that we tolerate intolerence

Nice little trick, equating people who disagree with you to Nazis and Klan members.

I disagree and I have another explanation - that the whiners actually have enough mental/creative flexibility to recognize that something is a completely made-up, arbitrary explanation and to classify it as such. The problem they have is not with interpretations, it's with passing it as facts. Like that high school teacher that tells you "what the author intended" as a fact of the matter even though she has no clue what the author thought, no base for her assertions except her own imagination - assertions which she probably learned from some "literature critics", who most likely didn't have any clue either.

(In Poland we have this urban legend about granddaughter of Stanisław Lem getting a bad grade on an assignment about interpretation of Lem's work, even though she went to his grandfather, asked about "what he intended" and wrote what he said verbatim.)

Interpreting works of art is fine, seeking new meanings, getting inspired, etc. is also fine. Just call a spade a spade. Otherwise it's just a particularly insulting intellectual dishonesty.

You don't need to look that far. Fahrenheit 451, which nearly everyone interprets as anti-government censorship, was written by Bradbury as anti-TV, i.e. "television is rotting people's minds". It's literally an old man grumbling about new technology. See: http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-mis...

In a sense, the English teacher telling you "this is what it means" is a bit like the science teacher saying "this is how physics works". It's a simplification of the real intellectual field to help people learn. Perhaps for some people the reduction is unhelpful though.

My experience is of being an analytical whiner throughout school, and then suddenly understanding the point when it was explained to me by a fellow analyst in university. I can't help wondering how much more I (and others) may have enjoyed English if someone had explained it sooner.

An English teacher telling you "this is what it means" is NOT the right thing for that English teacher to do! It alienates those who see that the teacher's "right" interpretation is arbitrary.

Most of what we do is completely made-up and arbitrary. "Beautiful, clean code" is completely arbitrary, you're just doing what your software engineering instructor told you is correct.

And I think you're completely missing the point -- the author's intention is not unknown, it is irrelevant, since the purpose of literature is not to explicitly convey a simple intention, it is to provoke a reaction in the reader; we first experience the art and second analyze which pieces of it are effective to make us feel how we feel. Intention of the author isn't interesting or meaningful. And to misunderstand that is to misunderstand art itself, which is why we see here people suggesting we "call a spade a spade" -- whatever that means.

And realistically your teacher probably knows a lot more about what the author intends than you do. There is a lot of historical context and other works that put the novel into context. But that's not even relevant; you're being taught to think and look for examples, it doesn't really matter if they were put there intentionally. When you develop your abilities and are good enough to think about literature past the high school level then you can start thinking for yourself, just like in every field, but when you're intellectually a child in the field, you need to listen and learn. Unfortunately most children are petulant and whine and decide since they don't understand it yet, it must be nonsense, and everyone who is an expert and has dedicated their life to it "didn't have any clue" and give up. Like you see here.

It isn't that I question the validity of the results because of how they were produced, but because I can produce many other quite different results with minimal effort that are no easier to dispute with sound reasoning than the 'official' message presented.

It is like a theory that, while explaining the results we saw, would just as easily explain any other results. Such a theory wouldn't be worth any further consideration unless the supporters are able to give it more sound structure so that we can actually have a reasonable way of saying 'no, that is wrong' or 'yes, that is right'.

As it stands, if there is a boat, I could say the boat is representing something feminine because boats are like sheathes and provide protection from the harshness of the sea like a mother or I could say the the boat is representing something masculine because it is piercing the water and representing historically masculine ideas of exploration and conquest. Any such analysis is largely useless as I can get what ever result I want.

Unless the point was to think about it, perhaps the travelling of the road is what's important, not the destination.

> jobs require them to sort out systems which, without proper foundational knowledge, would seem pretty confusing and arbitrary.

But they do respond to some kind of underlying rule or rules, which can be teased out, most of the time. That can be fun in many cases.

To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty?

The only English class I liked was journalism, where we were taught how to clearly and effectively communicate the facts known about something, and were rewarded by keeping things brief and to the point, rather than filling up pages with BS.

Yeah, I think a lot of English teachers push on over-interpreting, which drives some set of students away.

It's unfortunate because there is actually a lot of beauty to be found in literature, and each reader is free to find his or her own.

Beyond beauty literature helps establish empathy by exposing you to the inner-thoughts of different types of people, and it inspires creativity, both of which are useful in any field.

Journalism is actually a great example of the utility of literature classes - because even if you don't enjoy literature, the act of reading critically is an important skill to making sense of the world.

I'll take a leap and suggest that you and I can agree that much of what is called "news" these days does not merely transfer facts from the news organization to your brain. When you read a news article, you interpret it with context. You ask, what is the reputation of the agency reporting this news? Do they have a history of factual reporting? Do they bring a particular political bent or agenda to bear on their reporting? What words are they using to tell the story? What does it mean when someone refers to the "War on Terror" - how do you understand that metaphor? What memories, emotions, experiences does it evoke? How is that phrase intended to be interpreted?

There is so much more to write about this, but bottom line for me is: language drives human interaction. Understanding how others interpret language (through metaphor, shared understanding, history, etc.) is important for navigating that interaction. It helps us call bullshit on politicians who use words to conceal ignorance, or maybe on teachers who don't actually understand the literature they are presenting ;)

I imagine you were never rewarded for "filling up pages" with actual bull shit, so you picked up metaphors at some point along the way.

> language drives human interaction.

Very much so - and another reason I am all the more bitter about the waste of time that lit classes were: they also soured me to the whole thing for a long while.

That journalism class was great because, indeed, we also discussed how a story can misinform, even given the same underlying facts. I thought that was very useful and interesting. It was, like you say, about communication, its uses and misuses. The lit stuff never seemed to be about that, it was about obfuscation and the teacher's (?) interpretation of whatever.

I see. That's why I partially blame the teacher in that situation. I think a critical part of teaching is to contextualize the material in the larger picture.

I had a math teacher in high school who, when I asked why I had to learn the quadratic equation, answered with an asinine anecdote about someone asking her to recite it in a social setting. Mathematics felt similarly arbitrary to me at that point, and I was turned off to it for an unfortunately long period of time.

The thing was; it was a pretty clear pattern. I had good and bad science and math teachers, but even with the benefit of time and perspective, I don't hold most of the English ones in a very high regard, at least in terms of their teaching - many of them seemed to be perfectly kind and agreeable people.

One of the ones who was also held in fairly high regard in the school once got into 'time being relative', and trotted out, in the same sentence, something about experiments showing time being different at the poles and the equator, as well as something about time in "latin" cultures. That drove me up the wall!

That's a good point.

The most common question out of a student's mouth is "But why do we have to learn this?" And that's a pretty good question.

Unfortunately they're asking the people least likely to know. Teachers don't even know why most of these things are important. They learned them at school, and then they grew up and taught them, but they never passed through the stage of actually putting them to use in any other context.

Yeah! Lately I've read a few books on copy writing. That would have been hugely useful to study in high school; both in terms of learning to sell someone on something, which everyone needs to do sooner or later, as well as learning how other people try to sell to you.

> To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty?

This seems like a pretty common complaint. You seem to assume that literature should work like science. But the purpose of literature is not to rigorously refine a certain predictive model of the world. I don't want to claim exactly what it is, but maybe the telling of human experiences (and the analysis thereof) provides insights that help people better understand the muddier, less quantitative dimensions of the human world? And to that end, it doesn't matter at all whether a claim is based on what the author intended, as long as it provides some useful insight. (Yes, you _could_ use this to justify any claim at all about any piece of literature, and that's part of what this article is about. A lot of people may be "wrong" about what Frost intended, but it's insightful for them anyway, and that's just fine. Typically, academics expect that claims are based on evidence in the text, but that's still subjective and open to many interpretations.)

Similarly, the most effective way to communicate an idea is not always to present it logically and directly. There's the proverb: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." IME, it's almost always more effective to communicate an idea by causing the reader to come to it themselves. That's why narratives can be much more effective at communicating truths about human experiences than simply stating it outright. That's (one reason) why the story of Macbeth is more compelling than just telling someone "your obsession with power may make you miserable".

I agree entirely, but I think it would go a lot easier for everybody if literary interpretation were presented as personal, possibly-rewarding approaches to a text rather than authoritative assertion of fact.

My humanities-professor friends today are very good at taking the former approach, at least when talking with me. But the latter was definitely how literature was taught in all of the schools I went to. The green light on the dock was X. Or in another class, it was clearly Y. Or, in a third, it was X, and Y, and Z, and Ƶ and Ź and Ž and ζ, at which point the explanation seemed to be more akin to improvisational poetry about a Rorschach blot than any serious attempt at unpacking a metaphor or understanding an author. But it was still framed as authoritative analysis, which mainly made me think that the teachers were not so clear on what actual facts were.

Bingo!

In the same HS, I had an art teacher who was great. I gained an appreciation for abstract, 'modern' art, even if I didn't necessarily like everything I saw. She focused on how things made us feel, and if, for instance, they evoked images of other things. Stuff like that, which was all about suggestion and how elements in the image worked together, but without wrong answers or D's if we disagreed with her.

The problem with literary studies (as generally found in universities anyway) is that it's less about the author or the work and more about the critic. It's basically a pissing match to see who can construct the most impressive interpretation based on an arbitrary piece of literature.

I can accept that Literature is not about science as much as it is about defining the (intentional or non) meaning a literary work carries for its audience, but at university levels it certainly likes to present itself as if it were a science (rather than an art in itself) and embraces an obscene cargo cult effigy of what real science sounds like -- exactly like new age pseudo-science.

Furthermore, by presenting itself as a science, it gives undue authority to other social "sciences" that seem to get away with asserting falsifiable claims with no attempt to provide empirical evidence, which in turn transfers that false authority to political interest groups.

The world could do with a good amount less woo than it has now.

Agreed. Although I try to remember that technology isn't inherently less pissing-match oriented than, say, literary studies. I think the only advantage we have is that we work in a context where "prove it with numbers" is a stick that we can use to beat each other with. I think that happens to result in a modestly higher level of ambient truth, plus a modest disincentive to the more grandiose flights of bullshit.

What if there were really no signs of metaphor, and the boat trip was just a boat trip? How do you know you didn't just read a bunch of things into something the author didn't intend?

Maybe. But the cynical reflexivity with which such judgements are made immediately is … weird.

Strikes me as laziness and a basic unwillingness to even engage with something, basically a defense mechanism. It would probably be better to just admit that it’s not for you and leave it at that instead of claiming it to be sucky always forever and for everyone.

I think that's because the practice has many parallels with bad science. Ascribing a metaphor to the author without any evidence is pretty much an untestable, unfalsifiable hypothesis, and therefore has no value.

If you tell me that author X said that the boat is meant to be a metaphor for the protagonist's life, I will be the first to be excited and read the text looking for all the little easter eggs that the author put in, but without any evidence at all it's just your opinion.

This is also exacerbated by the lengths that people go to stretch their theory, which makes it even more obvious that they're grasping at straws in the face of evidence to the contrary.

2 years in college leads me to believe that this allergy is acquired. A person can only "engage" with topics they find to be boring, pretentious, or otherwise time wasting, so many times before "once bitten, twice shy" kicks into gear.

Also, don't forget, we inflict this process on people as part of basic education in the States. Ask 100 people what they think of classics like The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, and more likely than not the answers will be mostly negative.

Literary analysis is a subjective affair and turns quite a few people off, moreso when you are being graded on things like having the same opinion as the instructor. You can read something into a piece that may or may not be there, and in any case is more likely than not to be the product of your own experiences and biases, not the content of the work itself.

If the piece evokes some kind of emotion then it is fair game to analyze the piece to see how it accomplishes this. The problem is that there is no way to prove that an analysis is correct, but the reasoning of good analysis should be logical and plausible.

I definitely agree, but the GP was talking about symbolism, which, as far as I know, isn't one of the main ways to evoke emotion.

That is absolutely valid and in some cases, that is actually true. In other cases though, literary experts are fairly confident that the boat trip was a metaphor because they have gone through letters where the original author talks about what he/she is trying to accomplish with a particular piece.

One of the rules of studying literature is that you're always welcome to disagree, but that you need evidence if you want to go against the prevailing opinion. You're welcome to think that Howl is about an acid trip Ginsberg had where he thought he was a wolf, but if you want an A, you better have some letters he wrote to Kerouac about it. :)

Unless the prevailing opinion can be backed up with evidence then both opinions should be taken at face value.

Just because everyone claims pigs can fly doesn't mean that they can, not unless you can show me proof.

Exactly...and I think that only really bad people would disagree.

Often in literature, the prevailing opinion is backed up by material published in journals or highly cited books. And generally to get published in a journal, you need some compelling evidence. So, if I want to venture that T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land as a response to his own struggles with mental illness, I can back that up with citations from journals, or published books. If I want to go even further (and get an even better mark), I can go into the letters where he first hand talks about his struggles.

Just because I can back up my opinions with published material, it still doesn't mean that my opinions are correct.

To reverse your metaphor, let's say that you think pigs can fly and I think they can't. You say that pigs can fly because you saw it happen. I say that pigs cannot fly because of these respected books on physics and pig anatomy. You might actually be correct, but I should still win an efficiently run debate.

My objection is that people come up with the metaphor without any evidence. Of course if you know that the author intended the metaphor, go ahead and say it, but I seem to see many more people reading things into a sentence just to have something to say.

I think this is an area where many English teachers need work. Many English teachers present literary analysis as if it is what they experienced the first time they read a particular work. That may be true in some cases, but often, that opinion formed because it's what the experts in that particular writer say.

English classes, especially at the University level, would be so much more useful if, instead of saying "the boat trip signifies x", professors went into the reasons they believe that. In some cases, it is personal opinion. In other cases, it is personal opinion based on 30 published articles. And, in still other cases, it is their personal opinion because if they believed anything else, they'd be laughed out of conferences.

What you propose is a great way to do it. Especially if the justification is "the author said so, I'm not making it up".

Suppose the author was just really obsessed with boats for some reason, and wrote lots of texts about boats that nobody cares about except him, because no one shares his obsession.

It's possible that purely accidentally he wrote something boring about boats that causes readers to think interest things about things that are not boats. This will cause the poem to become popular by itself, without help from the author.

From a memetic perspective, this can be worthy of study.

That's different. Of course a work of art should evoke feelings, memories, thoughts, etc to you that are personal to you, it's a big part of what art is supposed to be.

What I have a problem with is ascribing these to the author without any evidence that they actually meant it that way.

>What I have a problem with is ascribing these to the author without any evidence that they actually meant it that way.

I'll try to find the artist - but they wrote a song and the fanbase didn't "get their message".

The lyrics were supposed to be face-value but people found metaphors where no metaphors were meant to be and devised an entire story around the song that didn't exist. How it related to his childhood growing up and the struggles of his teenage years, overcoming an addiction, etc.

The artist said in an interview (Paraphrased) "That's not at all what I meant when I wrote this song - but it does sound better. So I'll take the credit."

That's interesting, do let me know if you find the artist or an article about what happened.

I was unable to find it. Although I did find a number of songs where the artist had to tell people what it was about because they were misinterpreted. :) Same thing, slightly different scenarios.

Ah, thanks anyway!

Why must there be evidence and explicit intent expressed outside the text?

E.M. Forster said "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" Poker players have unconscious tells that reveal intent that is not verifiable by simply asking what their hand is, and they certainly wouldn't intentionally reveal what the subconscious reveals for them.

I've written fiction and while there's certainly intent in much of the crafting of a story or novel, there are also emergent themes, feelings, evoked emotions, and connections that go beyond anything I could concretely articulate as explicit intent. It's not surprising that when those emergent properties are interpreted by others that similar feelings are produced, connections made.

Can those evocations of emotion be "ascribed" to me independent of evidence? Well, they wouldn't have been evoked had the work not been created, so yes, they can be.

I suspect, as others point out, that your problem is more with academic conformance imposed by a lit instructor. But your tone seems to conflate those issues with the merit and value of literature, and the discussion of hypotheses about meaning.

You can form hypotheses about the intent of writing, and support it with evidence inside the text. It's not that far afield of rhetoric and debate. It's okay not to spend your time on that (just as I decided my analytical skills were better spent on investing, with a return, than fantasy sports). But I also don't begrudge those who decide they want to spend their time on endless mock drafts and fantasy sports leagues.

I'm glad you (and it sounds like davidw) had a great experience with other instructors though.

It's frankly disgusting and terrifying in equal measure. When I say something, I want to tell you that thing. I don't want my words to be misunderstood as your feelings. It's already extremely hard to communicate with people. It gets exponentially harder when you have to predict how they'll interpret what you say.

It's not the same, because this is a layer under the communication. It's like how you can understand perfectly well what a few lines on a sketch show, but a complete painting is something other than pure communication. So is creative writing, so I don't think that criticism is valid.

Its purpose is not to just communicate, and that's fine.

> Why must there be evidence and explicit intent expressed outside the text?

There mustn't. They can also be expressed inside the text, or at least hinted at.

> It's not surprising that when those emergent properties are interpreted by others that similar feelings are produced, connections made.

Sure, and saying "this work evokes in me these feelings" is fine. Saying "the author here is symbolizing X with Y" is not.

> But I also don't begrudge those who decide they want to spend their time on endless mock drafts and fantasy sports leagues.

I don't have a problem with people saying "I think that this may be symbolism for X", because then I can just say "well, I don't think it is, but sure". I have a problem with people expressing their hypothesis as fact, basically.

My favorite Hemingway quote:

"There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are sharks, no better, no worse."

The other day I watched Superman Returns and Man of Steel back to back. Spoilers follow, but I think I have a point.

The symbolism in Superman Returns was pretty obvious. In addition to the patriotism carried by the colours of his costume, he's obviously a kind of modern-day Superjesus: he's a superhuman only son sent to Earth to protect (save) all of mankind. There's even the entire death and rebirth aspect: he is beaten, then stabbed as the final blow with a lethal weapon (like the spear of destiny), he falls (in a posture reminiscent of Jesus on the cross) and (nearly) dies before being rescued. Then he dies again, staying in coma (for days?) before rising again.

The symbolism is there, it's easy to spot if you are looking for it but it blends in nicely enough that you can watch the film without paying any attention to it. It's subtle enough that you can argue whether it's symbolic or not and what is or isn't intended to carry a metaphor. After all the film is intentionally corny and mostly sees itself as a sequel to the famous Superman series that preceded it by a few decades.

Then there's Man of Steel. It doesn't even try to hide its symbolism. Kal-El asks a priest in a church for guidance whether to surrender himself in front of a stained glass window showing Jesus asking Yahweh for guidance whether to surrender himself. Kal-El drops out of the spaceship to save mankind in a static Jesus pose. His father's hologram ("His" "Spirit") says that he sent his only son to save mankind. And so on and so forth. Not to mention the facepalm-inducing moments where Kal-El points out how all-American he is despite being an (immigrant) space alien. The American/Christian symbolism is so obtuse it was even used to market the film to Christian audiences. It's less of a hidden allegory and more of a religious pamphlet.

What I'm trying to get at (other than Superman Returns clearly being the superior, if underrated, Superman movie and Man of Steel being a US-Christian circle jerk) is that there is a range. Some works of literature go out of their way to rub their symbolism in your face. In others it is present but more nuanced. In some it is subtle put still easy to find if you look for it. And in some any symbolism is merely a projection of what you are trying to find in it.

I would agree that most of the symbolism students of literary criticism tend to spend their energy on falls in the last category where you can show a work to handful of critics and get a lifetime's worth of different interpretations.

But as much as I personally despise the field as a whole, some works do carry intentional symbolism. And some works unintentionally provide symbolism when read in certain contexts.

When you look at "old" literature (i.e. literature that has long outlived its authors), most of the literature that has survived to the modern day is literature that provided meaning across the various generations. It's a legitimate question to ask "why" and "how" -- even if literary studies as a field tends to be more obsessed with the "what".

Symbolism up the unsubtle end of the spectrum, that you're actually supposed to notice consciously and comment on, becomes allegory, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Superman has been an allegory for Jesus and/or America in many of his appearances over his long life.

I agree. I just felt that in Man of Steel it was so overdone it actually got in the way of the story, breaking the immersion.

The other problem is that it didn't seem to have anything in particular to say about Jesus or America. (Gotta appeal to the international audience, after all...) So the allegory is pointless.

Citation? I find it hard to believe this quote came from the same man who invented the Iceberg Theory [0]. I recently read Hemingway's "Hills like White Elephants". This short story begs for symbolic interpretation. If we assume a lack of symbolism, there's no plot. Ostensibly - literally nothing happens.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory

I don't see how the Iceberg Theory would conflict with a lack of intentional symbolism at all.

Separate from that: There's plenty of literature with no plot.

When I was younger I loved writing stuff with no plot. My best grades were on works with no plot whatsoever. I wanted to write a novel-length work with no plot, in part because of the challenge, in part because I immensely enjoyed reading stuff with no plot.

I haven't read "Hills like White Elephants". Maybe it's full of intentional symbolism. Maybe not. But the absence of a plot is not the evidence of symbolism.

Hm, the wikipedia article contains a similar quote at the very bottom.

> When asked about the use of symbolism in his work, and particularly in the most recently published Old Man and the Sea, he explained: "No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in...That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better....I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea, a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."

After reading the wiki more closely, I think there's a middle ground. It seems the Iceberg Theory operated on Hemingway's omission of explicit symbols. Hemingway never outright mentioned the larger themes in his works. But the holes left were suggested by the context.

I think it's like instead of painting a mural of a deer in a forest, he'd paint a mural of (what appeared at first glance to be) an empty forest. Except on closer inspection, there would be a trail of disturbed vegetation, accompanied by fresh deer tracks.

The deer clearly exists somewhere in the scene's vicinity even though the audience never sees it. Similarly, I think Hemingway let the themes influence the story, but never let those themes manifest themselves as symbols the reader could easily point to. Instead, the themes manifested as a vibe the reader couldn't explain on a conscious level, or manifested as a series of convenient coincidences. Maybe we can compromise that Hemingway achieved symbolism without the symbols.

-----------------------------------------

I suspect much of our disagreement concerns the definition of "plot". In my mind, I can't see a short story or novel without a plot that would be very interesting. It would be equivalent of watching a film which showed nothing but paint dry for the entire duration. Even if there's no physical action, any halfway interesting movie is bound to have at least some sort of psychological action.

If there's no plot, then I would probably classify it as poetry (which "Hills like White Elephants" clearly isn't).

Maybe a better idea would be to point me to an example or two of successful stories which omit symbolism.

Citation:

Letter, Sept. 13, 1952, to the critic Bernard Berenson, in Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (1981).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author

That's an interesting argument. I haven't read the essay, so I don't have an informed opinion, but it doesn't especially convince me. The argument that the Wikipedia page mentions, for example (the one about Balzac), says that we can never know what Balzac intended. That's not the same as Balzac not knowing what he intended, so that argument is fallacious.

I agree the engineer/scientist move of dismissing all softer things as "horse shit" is regrettable. The older I get, the more I appreciate the sorts of subtlety I would have previously called nonsense. Especially so as I become better at introspection.

On the other hand, I think that an allergy to overextended metaphors and other woolly thinking is a handy bias in an engineer. And a lot of the flights of literary analysis would be much more palatable to we more literal-minded if it were framed as, "When I read X I enjoy thinking about it as Y" rather than "X is Y". Yet another case where a little E-Prime [1] would prevent a lot of argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

> dismissing all softer things

Not something I did at all. I just don't like one specific kind of literature and how it's presented.

Sorry for the confusion; like jtr1, I was referring to a broader tendency, and not you in specific. I shouldn't have quoted you directly there.

The teacher cares about the system composed of the poem and its cultural context; the student cares about the system composed of grades, tests, and credentials which will eventually allow them access to the work they want to do. The meaning of the poem may or may not be confusing and arbitrary, but our hypothetical engineering student is actually trying to play "guess which subset of all the possible meanings the teacher will accept", and is thus frustrated less with the actual poem than with the system which presents understanding of the poem as an obstacle toward the student's goals.

If I'd cared about the grade, I wouldn't have disagreed so vehemently with the teacher; I would have played along, like you said.

Sure, but I bet the only reason you remember the disagreement well enough to comment on it is that it was a teacher you had to disagree with. People talk all kinds of bullshit and it generally doesn't mean anything, but when someone with some authority talks bullshit, that's frustrating because you have to deal with it anyway.

At least do the hacker thing and explore the system for weaknesses. Some of my most memorable times from school were, when asked to interpret a work, intentionally crafting the most defensible interpretation I could find that would be offensive to the most people. Sometimes I was praised for my creativity, sometimes I was castigated for getting the "wrong" interpretation, and sometimes I would delightedly watch a professor squirm, knowing that they had painted themselves into a corner by previous disarming any attempts to refute interpretations to prop up their own.

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